art of problem solving headquarters

About the Art of Problem Solving Initiative, Inc.

Staff members.

Daniel Zaharopol

Chief executive officer.

Dan Zaharopol is the Founder of Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics (BEAM) , which works to create a realistic pathway for underserved middle school students to become scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and programmers. BEAM is a project of The Art of Problem Solving Initiative.

Previously, Dan was the Co-Founder and CEO of Learning Unlimited , an organization that helps college students create educational programs on their campuses. He also serves on the boards of directors of the Mathematics Foundation of America , which runs Canada/USA Mathcamp , and the New York Math Circle .

Dan graduated from MIT in 2004 where he studied mathematics, and earned dual master's degrees in mathematics (focusing on Algebraic Topology) and in mathematics education from the University of Illinois. He blogs at Consider Learning .

To view other staff members of the organization , please visit BEAM's website which has a full staff listing .

Board Members

Richard Rusczyk

President, board of directors.

Richard Rusczyk created the company Art of Problem Solving in 2003 to create interactive educational opportunities for avid math students, and expanded this work by founding the nonprofit Art of Problem Solving Initiative in 2004. He is one of the co-authors of the Art of Problem Solving classic textbooks, author of Art of Problem Solving's Introduction to Algebra, Introduction to Geometry, and Precalculus textbooks, co-author of Art of Problem Solving's Intermediate Algebra and Prealgebra, one of the co-creators of the Mandelbrot Competition , and a past Director of the USA Mathematical Talent Search . He was a participant in National MATHCOUNTS , a three-time participant in the Math Olympiad Summer Program , and a USA Mathematical Olympiad winner (1989). He graduated from Princeton University in 1993, and worked as a bond trader for D.E. Shaw & Company for four years. AoPS marks Richard's return to his vocation -- educating motivated students.

Darryl Hill, Ph.D.

Secretary, board of directors.

Darryl Hill is a senior program officer for measurement, learning and evaluation at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Previously he held roles in several school districts around the country, including as Assistant Superintendent of School Accountability and Governance for the Fulton County Schools in Atlanta, GA. He has a Ed.D. in Education Policy, Leadership, and Instructional Practice from Harvard University. Prior to attending Harvard, he built an outstanding mathematics team at Rickards High School in Florida, earning Mu Alpha Theta's most dedicated sponsor award.

Nanayaa Dadson

Treasurer, board of dirctors.

Nanayaa Dadson is a Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase & Co where she has worked since 1997. She was born and raised in Ghana, attended high school in the United Kingdom and moved to the United States to attend college. She holds a PhD, M.S. and B.S. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University.

Member, Board of Directors; Chair, New York City Board

Ken Baron is currently a Managing Director and a Senior Research Scientist at Two Sigma Investments, where he has worked since 2008. Ken has been in the field of finance and investment management for over 25 years. He was born and raised in New York City attending NYC public schools, including Stuyvesant High School. Ken completed an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Statistics from Stanford University. He is the co-author of Parimutuel Applications in Finance, a mathematical finance book. Ken has been a volunteer with BEAM since 2017, including teaching an enrichment class at BEAM titled "Money and Investing".

Edray Goins

Member, board of directors; chair, los angeles board.

Edray Herber Goins is Professor of Mathematics at Pomona College. He has worked as a researcher at both Harvard and the National Security Agency; and has taught at both Caltech and Purdue. Professor Goins has published over 20 journal articles in areas such as applied mathematics, graph theory, number theory, and representation theory; and on topics such as Diophantine equations, elliptic curves, and African Americans in mathematics. He has acted as a referee for 20 different journals in mathematics, served on dozens of panels for the National Science Foundation, and has given more than 150 invited addresses on his research.

Jeff Hoffman

Member, board of directors.

Jeff Hoffman is a Principal Analytical Lead at Google based out of New York City. Prior to Google, he worked in analytically oriented roles at Amazon and Target. Jeff has a MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a BA in Mathematics and Economics from Washington University in St. Louis. He was inspired to pursue higher learning in mathematics at a young age and has worked as a math tutor since he was in middle school.

Kristin Kearns-Jordan

Kristin Kearns-Jordan is Chief Executive Officer of the Urban Assembly (UA), a network of 21 small public middle and high schools serving primarily low-income New Yorkers. Before coming to the UA she served as Executive Director of the Tortora Sillcox Foundation, a foundation advancing educational equity and excellence in New York City, from 2007 - 2016. From 2000 to 2007, she was the founder and director of the Bronx Preparatory Charter School, a classical, college preparatory middle and high school in the South Bronx. She became the founding executive director of the School Choice Scholarships Foundation in 1997 after beginning her career in education at the Student/Sponsor Partnership. She has extensive nonprofit governance experience, including board roles at the Student/Sponsor Partners, the READ Foundation, the Bronx Preparatory Charter School, the Urban Assembly (before becoming CEO), and the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine (for the last three years as President). She is a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Brown University.

Kiran Kedlaya, Ph.D.

Kiran Kedlaya is Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. He has served as a member of the USA International Mathematics Olympiad team, a deputy leader of the USA IMO team, a member of the IMO 2001 executive committee, a member of the USA Mathematical Olympiad committee, and a co-author of a book on the Putnam competition.

Sandor Lehoczky

Sandor Lehoczky works for Jane Street Capital, a financial firm in New York City. He co-authored the Art of Problem Solving with Richard Rusczyk and graduated from Princeton in 1994.

Susan Schwartz Wildstrom

Susan Schwartz Wildstrom is a mathematics teacher at Walt Whitman High Schoolin Bethesda, MD. She is involved in many national mathematical associations, including the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America . She is also involved with the Committee on the American Mathematics Competitions and chair of the Committee on Local and Regional Competitions.

Art of Problem Solving

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Richard Rusczyk’s Worldwide Math Camp

By Ingfei Chen

At the start of a YouTube video titled “ Art of Problem Solving: Least Common Multiple ,” Richard Rusczyk invites viewers to play a game. Every twenty-four seconds, we’re supposed to clap; every forty-five seconds, we’re supposed to jump. The challenge is to keep going until we clap and jump at the same time. Rusczyk, who is dark-haired, clean-shaven, and boyish, gestures to a digital timer that appears in a corner of the screen. He starts the clock, stares at it, and fidgets. “Um, how long is this gonna take?” he asks, rolling his eyes like a teen-ager. “I hate waiting.”

When the timer hits twenty-four seconds, Rusczyk claps. When it reaches forty-five, he jumps. Meanwhile, on a digital blackboard, he starts trying to figure out when the clap and the jump will coincide. Over the course of a continuous seven-minute take, Rusczyk jumps and claps at the right times while scribbling equations. First, he tries writing out multiples of twenty-four, but gets bored. Then he tries expressing twenty-four and forty-five as products of their prime-number components: twenty-four is 2³ x 3¹, and forty-five is 3² x 5¹. “This is gonna work,” he says, clapping. Just as he concludes that it will take three hundred and sixty seconds for the clap and jump to converge, he claps and leaps simultaneously; as it happens, the timer has reached three hundred and sixty. It’s an exuberant, precise performance intended for middle-school kids, or younger ones, who are capable of doing advanced math.

Rusczyk, who lives near San Diego, founded Art of Problem Solving—or AoPS—eighteen years ago as a resource for budding math prodigies. Exceptionally gifted young math students often find classroom math unbearably easy and tedious; their parents can have difficulty obtaining sufficiently stimulating lessons. By offering online instruction in math that’s more complex than what’s in standard gifted-and-talented programs, AoPS has become a lifeline for math whizzes. Its free online forums also serve as a vital social network, allowing math prodigies to connect with kindred spirits every day.

Rusczyk began posting free videos more than a decade ago; he ad-libs without a written script. He made “Least Common Multiple,” with its quirky dramatization of a humdrum numerical concept, in 2011, at age forty. Some of his videos have garnered hundreds of thousands of views; occasionally, they feature his alter ego, a gravelly voiced character in dark shades and a black hoodie. Onscreen, Rusczyk conveys a playful, experimental fearlessness that sweeps young learners along. “It’s a slightly intangible quality that some people have, and he’s got it in spades,” the mathematician Sam Vandervelde, who is the head of Proof School, a private, math-centric liberal arts academy in San Francisco, told me.

Kristen Chandler, a former math teacher who is the executive director of MathCounts , a nonprofit that runs a popular middle-school math contest series, told me that Rusczyk is “a rock star at our competitions.” (Along with Raytheon Technologies, the Department of Defense STEM , and others, AoPS is a sponsor of the MathCounts program.) Pre-pandemic, Rusczyk attended the MathCounts national finals each May as an invited speaker; Chandler recalled how contestants and parents flocked to get his autograph and take selfies with him. One competitor asked Rusczyk to sign his forehead with a marker.

For years, AoPS grew gradually. It released print textbooks, Math Olympiad-prep materials, and an accredited online curriculum, including a free adaptive learning system containing thousands of hard math problems. In 2012, it began rolling out Beast Academy, an elementary-school curriculum in which advanced mathematical concepts are communicated to young math geeks by wisecracking comic-book monsters. It also opened ten brick-and-mortar learning centers across the country. By 2019, about thirty-six thousand math students from around the world were using its paid online curriculum or in-person courses, and tens of thousands more were consulting its textbooks for independent study.

In the spring of 2020, when schools shuttered , the company’s Web site traffic jumped five- to six-fold, and enrollments doubled. AoPS’s hundred employees began telecommuting, except for Rusczyk and four warehouse workers. On nights or weekends, Rusczyk and his wife, Vanessa, would go into the empty company headquarters—a two-story office building in the suburb of Rancho Bernardo—to help fill book orders. One Sunday when he was in the office, we connected over Zoom. He was dressed in a short-sleeved blue plaid shirt. Five feet seven, with cropped hair, Rusczyk has a quick, self-deprecating wit and sometimes laughs like a kid, almost doubled over. On a brief tour, he showed me stacks of book boxes in the warehouse and framed illustrations of Beast Academy monsters. In a dim hallway, the overhead fluorescent lighting had stopped working, except for one eerily flickering panel. “This is where the zombies are going to get me in the zombie apocalypse,” he said, grinning. (He read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy as a child.)

Now fifty, Rusczyk bonds easily with math-obsessed kids because he used to be one of them. Growing up, he was fast with calculations and showed a brilliant, intuitive grasp of geometric relationships. He had a competitive streak, and won many math competitions. But, at the same time, he experienced deflating setbacks that helped dissuade him from the academic pursuit of mathematics. He loved math—it had taught him about resilience, creativity, and the joys of finding one’s tribe. Still, he faced a conundrum: If you’re a math prodigy who doesn’t want to become a mathematician, what do you do with your life? Art of Problem Solving was his solution.

Rusczyk was born in Idaho Falls. He and his younger sister attended elementary schools in half a dozen states as their father, a U.S. naval officer and nuclear engineer, moved from one base to the next. Small but naturally athletic, Rusczyk played basketball and spouted pro baseball statistics—these “got him into numbers,” his mother, Claire, a former grade-school teacher, told me. In 1983, Claire read a newspaper article about the launch of the MathCounts program. Rusczyk, who was in seventh grade, signed up and did well; he loved being surrounded by dozens of teens who got a kick out of wrestling with numbers. Two years later, after the family had settled in Decatur, Alabama, he placed twenty-fourth at the MathCounts national finals.

Rusczyk became the star of his high school’s math team, which travelled to competitions around the Southeast. He also participated individually in the American Mathematics Competitions, a rigorous series organized by the Mathematical Association of America (M.A.A.). The contests built up to the U.S.A. Mathematical Olympiad, which back then was a five-question, three-and-a-half-hour examination. Rusczyk played tennis and ran cross-country, but he relished math and the company of his math buddies even more. His bookshelves were filled with math-contest ribbons and trophies. “I was definitely a trophy hunter,” he said. He spent hours practicing with old math-contest problems in his bedroom.

In June, 1987, after his sophomore year, he was invited to the M.A.A.’s Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program, reserved for those who’d placed in the top tier of the U.S.A. Mathematical Olympiad. The program was an intensive, monthlong math boot camp, held each year at either West Point or the Naval Academy, in Annapolis. (A redesigned program is now hosted by Carnegie Mellon University.) At West Point, Rusczyk was one of two dozen boot campers, nearly all boys. They stayed in spartan dorm rooms and were rousted early by the bugle call of reveille. Largely based on three exams in the first week—each roughly four hours long—six students would be chosen to represent the U.S. at the International Mathematical Olympiad, or I.M.O., in July.

Rusczyk arrived excited, expecting that he would be able to hold his own. On the first day, a professor stood at a blackboard and wrote “Counting” in chalk; the topic—“falling factorials”—was unfamiliar. Within minutes, Rusczyk was bewildered. It quickly became obvious that he wasn’t even close to being the brightest kid in the room. It was an unsettling feeling. Other students absorbed the math like sponges; some were clearly geniuses. Rusczyk couldn’t solve a single problem on the gruelling practice exams. Being outgunned by his cerebral classmates was inspiring but also terrifying. “I shut down by the end of the first week,” he recalled.

Still, the group was friendly, bantering over board games and Ultimate Frisbee. Rusczyk, who had brought his basketball, nimbly dribbled around the other campers. He formed strong friendships, including with Vandervelde, a fellow-Southerner. He noticed that Vandervelde and other top students—among them, the future mathematician and writer Jordan Ellenberg—appeared enthralled with pondering abstract numerical concepts and questions for their own sakes. Rusczyk realized that, for him, the appeal of math lay more in competition and camaraderie.

Rusczyk didn’t make the I.M.O. team; later he learned that a few other students were also struggling. The next summer, he attended the boot camp again, this time in Annapolis, and was still frequently perplexed. Nevertheless, he kept studying; in his senior year of high school, he began working through some mathematical proofs, attaining a more genuine grasp of the concepts. He graduated as valedictorian, was a winner of the U.S.A. Mathematical Olympiad—at that time, eight medals were awarded each year—and returned to the boot camp for a third summer. Although he didn’t qualify for the I.M.O. team that year, either—Vandervelde and Ellenberg did—he was picked as an alternate. He left the camp early after falling ill, ranked as one of the top eight high-school math students in the nation.

Rusczyk went to Princeton, famed for its powerhouse math department. But he was burned out. The boot camps had left him certain that he lacked the creativity to solve the great abstract mysteries of theoretical mathematics. (Paul Zeitz, an emeritus math professor at the University of San Francisco, told me that Rusczyk may have been too hasty in reaching this conclusion: performance in math contests, Zeitz said, has little to do with becoming a superb mathematician.) Rusczyk also doubted that he possessed the patience to devote a lifetime to math research. He decided to major in chemical engineering.

And yet he wasn’t quite ready to leave the math-contest world behind. Soon afterward, for fun, Rusczyk, Vandervelde, and Sandor Lehoczky, a younger Olympiad boot camper, created their own mail-in math contest. They called it the Mandelbrot Competition, named after Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals. The trio ran into an issue: they found that the contest problems they came up with were too hard for the participants. Rusczyk discussed the problem with Lehoczky, who was also at Princeton. They concluded that opportunities to learn advanced math were scarce and unevenly distributed. Many young math enthusiasts didn’t know about competitions and élite summer programs; looking back at their Olympiad boot camp experiences, the pair saw that, although some of the mathletes were unquestionably smarter, others simply had earlier exposure to complex math, or access to university mathematicians, or had attended special schools with a high-octane math-team culture. “We should write a book,” Lehoczky declared; it could help democratize advanced math. The two went on to self-publish a two-volume textbook titled “ The Art of Problem Solving .” The book taught “not facts , but approaches ,” they wrote. “If you find yourself memorizing formulas, you are missing the point.”

In the fall of 1993, Rusczyk—newly married to Vanessa—started a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Stanford. But research still struck him as unappealing. He dropped out after eight weeks. Meanwhile, orders for the math textbook were trickling in. He drove to local schools, hawking the book and hunting for a job as a math teacher. A small private high school hired him, but it wasn’t the right fit, either: he liked teaching, but it was tough to win over the students who abhorred math. Rusczyk figured that he could reach a thousand keen math students a year with the textbook. That summer, he quit the teaching job, too.

In the mid-nineties, Wall Street was emerging as a place where mathematical minds could excel. Rusczyk was recruited for a job at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw; during his interview, he ran into two math-competition geeks he knew. He enjoyed his time trading bonds, but still wanted to build something of his own. After the markets went sideways in 1998, he quit. The following year, he and Vanessa relocated to San Diego, where they bought a fixer-upper; the house was surrounded by national forest and came with three donkeys. For a while, the couple coasted, repairing the house and planting a garden. They became avid hikers. “If I let him choose the hike, it’s always whatever is the highest, whatever is the longest,” Vanessa told me. One of his hobbies was working on old Math Olympiad problems, which could leave him obsessed and cranky until he solved them. The Internet was still new; Rusczyk did some online math tutoring and began thinking about the possibilities.

In 2003, when he was thirty-one, Rusczyk launched artofproblemsolving.com . He used off-the-shelf forum software to set up a community message board and led interactive classes based on his and Lehoczky’s books. Word spread, and young math brainiacs from around the world joined the forum, sharing nerdy puns, posting intriguing problems, and spurring one another along. Yufei Zhao, an early community member from Canada who competed in the I.M.O. three times and is now a math professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recalled his routine after getting home from high school: “Logging onto this forum was the first thing I did,” he said.

In the twenty years from 1995 to 2014, teams from the U.S. never managed to rank first at the I.M.O. But since 2015 the U.S. has claimed four first-place victories there—an outcome partly attributable to AoPS. Many variables played a role in those successes—including other math enrichment programs and the tutelage of lead coach Po-Shen Loh—but all the members of those winning U.S. teams were AoPS’s students. They were among the first generation to grow up with access to its curriculum. In learning mathematics, just as with studying piano or playing tennis, the earlier that talented individuals start training, the more they may be able to attain. In Rusczyk’s view, this isn’t just a matter of acquiring mathematical knowledge. The pervasive stereotype of children who are labelled as “geniuses” or “gifted” at math assumes that their brilliance requires little effort; by that definition, a genius shouldn’t struggle to learn. (Rusczyk and many other math educators aren’t fans of those labels.) Rusczyk’s boot camp experiences, however, had prepared him for confronting tough, unfamiliar problems of any kind. By normalizing struggle and failure from an earlier age, AoPS was designed to show math prodigies that it was O.K. to stumble and grow.

When COVID-19 struck , AoPS, working pro bono, built a web platform to host the U.S.A. Mathematical Olympiad and other contests. In lieu of the MathCounts national finals, Chandler and her colleagues unofficially offered their 2020 state competition exam on the AoPS site. The day after the test, Rusczyk and David Patrick, a former math professor who is an AoPS curriculum director, reviewed some of the questions in an AoPS chat room before an audience of more than three thousand online students. Rusczyk moderated the chat from two large monitors at his standing desk at work; the walls around him displayed a letter from Benoit Mandelbrot and two delicately rendered oil paintings, by Vanessa, of white manzanita blossoms and red Indian paintbrush. Typing on his keyboard, he walked through the first problem, about an equilateral triangle. Each time he posted a question, a wave of replies came back; he grinned as the students chimed in. “They’re fast, and they all want to be first,” he told me. While discussing a subsequent problem, he laughed at a student’s message: “I got it before you did, Richard!”

While Patrick reviewed the next set of problems, Rusczyk sipped water from a stainless steel mug. I asked whether he had been like these kids.

“Honestly, we’re building stuff for the thirteen-year-old version of ourselves,” he said. “It turns out these kids are a lot like us. They find the same things neat. They find the same things beautiful.”

Many AoPS students learn from one another at the same time as they learn from Rusczyk and his team. Olivia, a precocious twelve-year-old who lives in the rural town of La Grande, Oregon, was able to intuit basic algebra concepts by age eight; last July, she began her first online course with AoPS, in algebra. At the initial weekly class session, the teacher posted the first problem to the chat room, and Olivia, unaccustomed to the text-chat format, copied it down with a pencil. When she glanced back up, other pupils had already submitted their answers. Their speed stunned her. “You could see this panic,” her mother, Angela D’Antonio, recalled. But Olivia soon became a frequent visitor to the online message board to work with other students on hard “challenge problems.” (The other kids were situated in Toronto, India, and Singapore, among other places.) She quickly became one of the first to answer problems during class. Olivia has “just grown by leaps and bounds,” D’Antonio said, and not just in math; on the AoPS boards, Olivia—who is usually shy—has discovered friends with whom she can talk about Dungeons & Dragons and cryptography.

AoPS’s paid resources aren’t cheap. An online high-school-level course with a textbook can cost more than six hundred dollars; the elementary-school-level Beast Academy print books run about a hundred and twenty dollars per set, and a subscription to the accompanying online platform costs ninety-six dollars a year. For much of the past twenty years, U.S. public school systems have mainly focussed on raising the academic proficiency of the weakest students; the families of math overachievers were forced to turn, when they could, to private enrichment programs—from math circles and summer camps to AoPS and newer Web sites, such as Brilliant and Expii. Still, around seventy public school districts, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Mankato, Minnesota, now buy AoPS materials for their advanced elementary-school students—a move accelerated by the pandemic.

Meanwhile, since 2011, the nonprofit that Rusczyk founded, the Art of Problem Solving Initiative, has supported a residential summer camp program for mathematically talented middle-school kids from low-income and historically marginalized communities. The camp is now known as Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics ( BEAM ) Summer Away, and is held in New York and Los Angeles. Led by a math educator named Daniel Zaharopol, it has provided more than six hundred students with long-term mentoring and support. This year, BEAM is also giving selected fifth-graders at around ten partnering schools across the U.S. free access to AoPS curricula and other supporting resources. In a separate experiment led by AoPS, this fall more than three hundred bright, math-curious pupils from underserved areas of Atlanta, Detroit, San Juan, and elsewhere have been participating in live-streamed AoPS classes for free.

In mathematics, a concept known as the random walk describes a meandering path that is determined, at each step, by a random process, such as tossing a coin. Say you’re standing at a street corner on Fifth Avenue and you flip two coins. If it’s two heads, you walk one block north; if it’s one head and one tail, you walk one block east, and so on. At each intersection, you repeat the process. According to a century-old theorem by a Hungarian mathematician named George Pólya, if you keep up this sort of exercise, after many, many coin flips, the probability of winding up where you started approaches a hundred per cent.

Rusczyk learned about random-walk theory as a teen-ager at a math-tournament lecture; Lehoczky was there, too. Later, while visiting an amusement park, they began flipping coins to decide where to go or what to do. Should they climb over a fence or take the long way around? Have hot dogs or pizza for lunch? The game became a lifelong tradition. Once, coin-flipping their way around Manhattan, the two friends wound up at a Tibetan restaurant; they never would have chosen it, but it turned out to be good.

Our major life choices aren’t purely random, of course, but they can feel like leaps of faith. In some ways, random-walk theory seems like an apt metaphor for Rusczyk’s peregrinations into and away from math. “I got pulled back to the origin,” he said. Creating AoPS was a return to his math-competition roots.

And yet he doesn’t see himself, or his company, as teaching mathematics. Its mission is “to discover, inspire, and train the great problem solvers of the next generation”; its real impact, Rusczyk said, might be “revealing to the kids themselves how much they can do” at something they love. Rusczyk hopes to expand Beast Academy—which is currently used with gifted kids in grades 2-5—into a full K-6 curriculum that public elementary schools can adopt for regular math classes. It would be a further step toward democratizing advanced learning. He figures that some kids are unaware that they are potential math whizzes. He wants to help students “find themselves” earlier than seventh grade, when he found himself. He hopes that the curriculum might help guide more young brainiacs toward lives in math, or outside of it—in science, finance, or Silicon Valley.

One Sunday, I Zoomed with Rusczyk while he and Vanessa worked a morning shift in the AoPS warehouse. They’d woken up early and sipped coffee in their garden as dawn broke, then unloaded hay to feed their donkeys. Rusczyk had driven his dark gray Tesla to the AoPS office, where he’d done a quick sanitizing wipe-down of surfaces in the second-floor break room and bathrooms. He printed out book-order invoices in the finance office, then ran down to unlock the front door for Vanessa, who had driven separately. A petite brunette with frizzy tresses, she walked in wearing flip-flops, shorts, and an olive-green tank top; Rusczyk, who was dressed in green cargo shorts and a red T-shirt, looked serious and a bit tired. His days were crammed with e-mails and video and phone meetings—the workaday business of shepherding his expanding firm in the middle of a pandemic.

In the shipping room, he grabbed Beast Academy books, which were stocked on metal shelves, and laid them atop a growing tower of crisscrossed book orders on a red plastic cart. Each time the cart filled up, he transferred the books to an array of tables. It was work he actually enjoyed, he told me. The textbooks were a direct link to the enthusiastic math learners who would soon be engrossed in their pages.

“Feels like we’re doing something real,” Vanessa said, working at her own book cart.

“Yeah—doing something real,” Rusczyk said. A couple thousand books would be boxed and shipped the next day.

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Art of Problem Solving (AoPS) develops educational opportunities for many of the most eager students in the world. Since 2003, we have trained tens of thousands of the country’s top students, including nearly all the members of the US International Math Olympiad team, through our online school, learning centers, textbooks, and online learning systems. Over the years, our international online community of advanced problem solvers has grown to over 800,000 members. While our primary focus has been math for most of our history, we have started expanding into new subjects, such as language arts, science, and computer science. Our home office is in sunny San Diego.

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In advanced math, science, and language arts courses, students find lifelong friends, mentors, and role models as they reach new heights together. explore our course offerings for grades 1–12..

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Since 1993, Art of Problem Solving has prepared hundreds of thousands of motivated students in grades 2–12 for college and career success. Through our innovative approach, students build a problem-solving foundation, an unparalleled skill set that helps them overcome obstacles in school and in life.

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If you’re looking for a challenging, interactive environment where your student will build the skill stack to succeed in school and beyond, you'll find it at AoPS Academy Irvine!

Our family regularly talks about AoPS. We try to think about how our life would be different without you all. What if my daughter hadn't learned to love math? What if she never experienced being pushed to her limits? Overcoming failure? She wouldn't be who she is. And she is AWESOME! A very proud mom here. We are so fortunate that we found AoPS Academy. I credit AoPS for much of her confidence.

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The art of problem solving : accompanied by Ackoff's fables

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Better World Books

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